Earliest Evidence of Animal Life

Science Daily is reporting on evidence for animal life around 585 million years ago, the first concrete evidence of such. They write:

The discovery was made by U of A geologists Ernesto Pecoits and Natalie Aubet in Uruguay. They found fossilized tracks a centimeter-long, slug-like animal left behind 585 million years ago in silty, shallow-water sediment.

A team of U of A researchers determined that the tracks were made by a primitive animal called a bilaterian, which is distinguished from other non-animal, simple life forms by its symmetry -- its top side is distinguishable from its bottom side -- and a unique set of "footprints."

This is during the Ediacaran Period, which ran from 635 million to around 540 million years ago, part of the Neoproterozoic era. More pieces of the puzzle. Yay!

Amazing Find Rock Evolutionary Theory!!

According to The Panda's Thumb, a fossil find in pre-Cambrian beds in the Flinders Range in Australia will overturn the theory of evolution. Nick Matzke writes:

It’s hard to believe, but a reptile has been found in Precambrian strata (specifically Ediacaran) – with preserved skin. This sometimes happens in more recent deposits, but there has never been a case this old. Plus, this fossil is the first one I’ve ever seen that could meet Haldane’s criteria for falsifying evolution: a Precambrian rabbit. I mean, I guess now that push comes to shove I have to say that I wouldn’t give up evolution because of one out of place fossil, but I’ve always prided myself on sticking to the evidence, so I figured I should post it as soon as I heard about it.

Here is the accompanying photo that is truly quite startling.



Oh yeah, by the way, Australia is across the International Date line. It is now April 1 over there.

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More on the Burgess Shale.

After my post on the work that is being done on the Burgess Shale, a reader wrote to accuse me of dishonesty in providing the story. I was going to reply within the comments section but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it probably needs to be a post. This is what the reader wrote:

You didn't tell the whole truth. The Cambrian has starfish, jellyfish, sponges and clams to name a few have not change a bit in 530 million years.

The fact that some of the other species are now extinct is beside the point.

The argument by Creationists is that life sprang into existence! There is nothing that has been found in the pre-Cambrian that can explain the explosion of life in the Cambrian.

Why are Darwinians so dishonest?

Thanks for the article even though it is very misleading.

Dear reader, my point was not to say that there are some forms of life that have remained unchanged. My point was to show that the life in the Cambrian appears over the course of some 30-50 million years. This is not exactly springing into existence. As I mentioned in another post, to put this into perspective, 30-50 million years ago there were no whales, no bears, no modern cats, no modern dogs and no humans. In fact, humans aren't even recognizable 10 million years ago. 30-50 million years in geological terms is a short period. For biological organisms, it is a pile of years. As far as your argument that life "sprang into existence," lets see what Duane Gish has to say:

In the Cambrian geological strata there occurs a sudden, great outburst of fossils of animals on a highly developed level of complexity. In the Cambrian rocks are found billions of fossils of animals so complex that the evolutionists estimate they would have required one and a half billion years to evolve. Trilobites, brachiopods, sponges, corals, jellyfish, in fact every one of the major invertebrate forms of life are found in the Cambrian. What is found in rocks supposedly older than the Cambrian, that is in the so-called pre-Cambrian rocks? Not a single indisputable fossil! Certainly it can be said without fear of contradiction, the evolutionary predecessors of the Cambrian fauna have never been found.

Gish is absolutely incorrect about what is found in the pre-Cambrian rocks. There are extremely well-described fossils, many of which (but not all) can be shown to be ancestral to Cambrian forms. While it is true that Trilobites appear in the early Cambrian, they do not diversify into the nearly 17 000 species they eventually become until late in the Cambrian.

Regarding your comment about nothing being found in pre-Cambrian sediments that can explain the explosion of life in the Cambrian, I found over 1700 articles arguing to the contrary in one pass. Here is what just one, Peterson et al. (2008) has to say about it:

Despite the presence of many different stem-group taxa, the Ediacaran is still a transitional ecology, with these organisms confined to a two-dimensional mat world. This stands in dramatic contrast to the Early Cambrian where the multi-tiered food webs that so typify the Phanerozoic were established with the eumetazoan invasion of both the pelagos and the infaunal benthos (Butterfield 1997, 2001; Vannier & Chen 2000, 2005; Dzik 2005; Peterson et al. 2005; Vannier et al. 2007). Hence, although the Ediacaran is an apparent quantum leap in ecological complexity as compared with the ‘boring billions’ that characterize Earth before the Ediacaran, it is still relatively simple when compared with the Cambrian, yet another quantum leap in organismal and ecological evolution. Thus, the Ediacaran stands as the transition interval between the ‘Precambrian’ and the Phanerozoic.¹

So the question I have to ask is, after reading the article about someone who is out in the field, actually examining the data, how can you accuse him of dishonesty? Furthermore, why would I believe someone who has never actually looked at the data over someone who is intimately involved with it and publishing about it? Now who is being dishonest?


¹Peterson, K.J., Cotton J.A., Gehling, J.G. and Pisani, D. (2008) The Ediacaran emergence of bilaterians: congruence between the genetic and the geological fossil records. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2008 363, 1435-1443

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Early Life and the "Snowball Earth"

Evidence is building that between 850 and 500 million years, the earth was subjected to a series of mega-ice ages that resulted in a condition called "snowball earth." Now it is being suggested that this "snowball earth" may have been enough to give life its needed boost. An article in the NewScientist, by Douglas Fox and Michael La Page recounts the recent discoveries leading to this:

Some of the biggest finds have come from an ancient seabed in China, called the Doushantuo Formation, where unusual conditions preserved some extraordinary fossils. Layers between 550 and 580 million years old, during the last part of the Ediacaran, contain tiny spheres consisting of anything from one to dozens of different cells - just like the early embryos of animals. Some have suggested they are the remains of giant bacteria, but a series of studies over the past decade have left little doubt that they really are animal embryos.

In 2007, for instance, Leiming Yin of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China reported finding embryos encased inside hard, spiky shells - unlike anything produced by bacteria. What is more, shells that are identical apart from the lack of preserved embryos on the inside can be found in rocks as old as 632 million years - the dawn of the Ediacaran - suggesting that the animal embryos themselves go back this far.

How did the ice ages play a role?

"This glaciation reset the chemistry of the oceans," he says. Ice caps covering the continents halted delivery of sulphur to the oceans and cut off production of hydrogen sulphide. "You have changes in ocean chemistry like an increased availability of molybdenum and zinc," says Ariel Anbar, a biogeochemist at Arizona State University in Tempe, "all of which play into making the world more hospitable for eukaryotes and ultimately, metazoans."

Sponges or something like them would have been the first animals on the scene. They lack a nervous system and have no need for circulatory systems. Animals like jellyfish might also have evolved early.

More pieces of the puzzle.

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